Development and business news from The Void

The Road to Release – Dev Blog 27

Happy New Year! Now that the festive season is coming to an end, it’s time to take stock of what happened last year, and point our eyes forward to see what will be coming in 2019. We are incredible excited about the up and coming year – and the opportunities that are on the horizon!

2018

Fringe Planet originally started as an experiment concerning voxels and pathfinding in January 2018. A weird (and slightly spooky bug) in this experiment provided the initial inspiration for creating Fringe Planet. After a few weeks of planning and writing a rather voluminous Game Design Document, the first git commit for the game took place on the 26th January and there has been many more commits since then!

Last year we were accepted into the Indietopia NL accelerator program – which means we are regularly traveling over to the beautiful city of Groningen for in person mentoring, pitching opportunities and getting weekly sessions about how best to run a game development business. This partnership has been incredible beneficial to us, and has allowed work to continue on the game where otherwise it may not have been possible – we would like to thank everyone in the accelerator for their guidance and advice.

We also visited some game development conferences, and met some fantastically interesting and talented folks – Develop : Brighton being amongst our favourites, it was such an incredible mix of AAA developers, artists, indiedevs and business folks.

We also attended the virtual conference The Business of Indie Games – which contained many hours of incredibly useful insights from people from all aspects of the indie world. We totally recommend this – not only are the talks incredibly useful, but the advantage of attending while sitting at home and drinking tea is not to be scoffed at!

2019

Fringe Planet will be released this year. This is why we are incredibly excited about 2019. We’ve got an incredible community of people who are awesomely engaged with the game and we can’t wait to let them start to play it. The road to release will start in the next couple of months. There are three different stages to release (each with a natty code name) : primus, secundus and tertius.

Primus

The major goal here is a successful KickStarter – a lot more information will be mentioned in the future, but we are aiming to launch the KickStarter in March. This provides us with an amazing opportunity to not only gain funding, but more importantly to get a “Lite” version of the game out in the public domain. This “Lite” version will be a subset of features and gameplay that will give a great taste of if the game is for you and will be available for free – it’s launch will coincide with the KickStarter. But fear not, you won’t have to wait until March to play it – we will be running a closed alpha of the game before that. More details about how to sign up to the closed alpha will be appearing soon, but we are incredibly excited about it.

Secundus

With the successful KickStarter out of the way, the next step is to start selling the game, and this will be done on a digital storefront (as yet undecided, most likely Steam but alternatives are being looked into and discussed). This will not be the “Lite” version – but a stable release of the current game in all it’s glory (KickStarter backers will get access to this version of the game well before it starts selling). This will be marked as Early Access. At the same time we will producing a very detailed roadmap of all development planned for the version 1.0 release. This will allow people who have brought the game to track the development process and allow us to get feedback about future.

Tertius

With the roadmap in place, and people playing the game, we will enter a cycle of regular development updates. With new content released every 2 months, until the roadmap is complete. Once the roadmap is complete, then the game officially becomes “Version 1.0” and will leave Early Access (note this may not happen this year). However, we still plan to release regular content for Fringe Planet after “Version 1.0” – a 4 month cycle of content updates will start, each one focusing on a certain aspect of the game. New roadmaps will be created so people can see what is coming. Note: All DLC/content updates are free and will be forever. Buying Fringe Planet next year will get you everything that has been developed so far.

How can you help?

As with any indie game, we need exposure. Feel free to talk about or discuss the game (or even ask us about it, talking about Fringe Planet is what we do best!). If you are a streamer, blogger or journalist – we are always happy to do interviews to talk about the game, just drop us an email : nic@fringeplanetgame.com or reach out to us on twitter : @beebug_nic or @fringeplanet – our DMs are always open. We will also be running competitions in the up and coming months where you can grab some very cool Fringe Planet merchandise.

Thanks very much for reading this blog post – and we hope your 2019 goes fantastically!

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About Fringe Planet

Fringe Planet is a survivor simulator inspired by Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld, set in a Lovecraftian influenced universe where both magic and science co-exist. It is being developed by a single developer in the United Kingdom. Join us in the journey through madness!